Political Science Professor Julia Gray and doctoral student Chloe Ahn, recipients of a 2023 DSSG seed grant, have been awarded an extension of their grant for 2024. Their project aims to understand the historical role of Black newspapers in advocating for issues important to the Black community on an international scale, which has been absent or misrepresented in mainstream media. In their work so far, the team has trained word embedding models to digitized newspapers published between 1940 and 1980. These models identify key differences in language usage between Black and white newspapers. The extension of this seed grant will allow the team to continue rigorous data cleaning and analysis as well as expand the analysis to fullpage files from newspapers, in addition to individual articles.

Team: Julia Gray and Chloe Ahn (PhD student)

Criminology Professor Maria Cuellar will be studying the accuracy and fairness of facial recognition technology (FRT) with the 2024 DSSG grant. Given the increasing use of FRT in police departments and its potential for bias, this project aims to assess the accuracy and fairness of FRTs in the kinds of images used by the police. On completion, the project will provide a resource for police departments seeking to minimize the harms done by FRT and change the way this technology is scrutinized before it is employed. Cuellar intends for the research to be a resource for judges, attorneys, and scholars alike in evaluating the impact of FRT in criminal trials. 

Team: Maria Cuellar and James To (PhD student)

Post-doctoral researcher Emerson Arehart and professors Erol Akçay and Joshua B. Plotkin of the Department of Biology will address the challenges of modeling and forecasting regime shifts in complex ecosystems negatively affected by human activity. Their project focuses on social-ecological systems, like the Amazon Basin, where human behaviors interact with natural processes in unpredictable ways. Using a new technique called Universal Differential Equations (UDEs), which combines neural networks with traditional mathematical models, they aim to improve predictions of sudden ecological shifts. By capturing the complex dynamics within these environments, this approach could help anticipate and potentially mitigate disruptive changes in vital ecosystems.

Team: Erol Akçay, Joshua B. Plotkin, and Emerson Arehart

Prof. Irina Marinov, Department of Earth and Environmental Science, and Prof. Michael Weisberg, Department of Philosophy, will be exploring where  hot spots of climate change will be, how their distribution will change between now and 2100, how global poverty and inequality will change in response to expected climate changes, and whether there is predictive power in indicators in determining socio–economic and political outcomes? The project involves the newest generation of climate models with high spatial and temporal resolution and more sophisticated representations of Earth System components. The petabyte size of the datasets requires substantial computation time, relying on Python on the new Pangeo platform for Big Data geoscience on the Cloud.

Team: Irina Marinov, Macy Stacher (undergrad student), Jacob Stranger (undergrad student)

Prof. Hanming Fang, Department of Economics, and Prof. David Abrams, Penn Law, will be using policing data from Chicago and Philadelphia to improve our understanding of what causes police confrontations and escalations. The  project will use machine learning methods to explore the characteristics of police partners to see whether they have an impact on whether an incident escalates. The project will also assess whether there are important external factors, like economic conditions, time of day, calendar effects, or weather, that influence the likelihood of negative incidents.

Team: Hanming Fang, David Abrams, Ornella Darova (PhD student)

Prof. Emilio Parrado, Department of Sociology, will be using data science methods to organize and explore data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). Immigration cases now represent close to 52 percent of all federal criminal prosecutions making prosecutions for illegal entry, illegal re–entry, and other immigration violations, the major focus of federal criminal enforcement efforts. EOIR is required to make the case data available for public inspection, but the raw data is far from usable. This project will extract key information from close to 10 million court proceedings going back to 1951. The project will explore factors affecting court decisions such as removals resulting from illegal entries and asylum petitions.

Team: Emilio Parrado, Dylan Farrell-Bryan (PhD student)

Prof. Julia Gray, Department of Political Science, will conduct a pioneering study on coverage of international affairs in black newspapers in the US. These include Pennsylvania papers such as the Christian Recorder (the oldest continually published black paper in the US); the Philadelphia Independent (which ceased publication in 1971); the Philadelphia Tribune; and the Pittsburgh Courier (defunct in 1966), as well as prominent mid–Atlantic papers such as the Baltimore Afro-American, the Washington Informer, and the Washington Sun. The project uses text–as–data methodologies – including Named Entity Recognition, Structural Topic Modeling, and sentiment analysis – to quantify and analyze coverage of international issues in black communities in the US, particularly surrounding the creation of the League of Nations as well as in the formation of and development in the United Nations. Black newspapers are a rich – although surprisingly understudied – source of information about historical discourse on international racial issues and racial representation in the 20th century.

Team: Julia Gray, Jared Mitovich (undergrad student), Dina Zhanybekova (undergrad student), Teodora Dragic (undergrad student), Bhavana Akula (undergrad student)

Prof. Aurélie Ouss, Department of Criminology, will examine how prosecutorial decisions on charging, bail, diversion, pleas, and sentencing affect court outcomes and short- and long-term socioeconomic well-being. This project builds upon an existing two-year collaboration the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office (DAO). Using administrative data spanning multiple sources, the project will evaluate the role that prosecutorial decision-making can play in mitigating social, political, and economic disparities that emerge within the criminal justice system.